Center displays historic martyr’s Bible

Six hundred years ago, a rich and defiant English merchant named Richard Hunne sued church authorities until, exasperated, they had him jailed in London’s Lollard’s Tower, where wires were driven up his nostrils to his brain until he died in a pool of blood, becoming one of the British Protestant Reformation’s most famous martyrs.

The night he died so horribly, church reformer Hunne had at his side an illegal English language Bible, whose possession by itself would have been a crime punishable by death, even without the pestering lawsuits. Medieval churchmen were not keen on the masses being able to read the Latin scriptures in their own vernacular languages. Most underground English Bibles were burned, yet Hunne’s Bible not only survived, perhaps stolen by his torturers and executioners for a profitable sale, but is now coming, more than a half millennium later, to Murfreesboro.

The exhibition, From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Forbidden Book, runs through April 29 and will feature Hunne’s Bible, fragments of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, a 5,100-year-old pictographic tablet, ancient Christian art and many other religious rarities.

“The Hunne Bible is the most significant artifact of the British Protestant Reformation in private hands. Period,” noted Biondi. “It was a capital crime to own it.”

And yet, the English Bible’s original owner, Thome Downe of Haloghton, in a daring act of faith and defiance, inscribed his name in the forbidden book, ironically, in Latin, not English.

Nearly a century after the storied Bible was first hand-copied for Downe, it came into the possession of Hunne, a self-made businessman and a church reformer with no hesitance to pick fights with church authorities. Once, when Hunne entered a cathedral, the Bishop of London suddenly stopped a mass, declaring that he would not proceed as long as a “heretic” was in the company. So Hunne promptly sued the bishop for libel.

After Hunne was tortured and murdered, embarrassed authorities tried to fake a suicide hanging in his cell. But a post-mortem inquiry cited a small sea of blood that contradicted the officially encouraged hanging scenario.

A few years later, Hunne’s defiance of the Vatican helped embolden none other than the famous King Henry VIII to pull England out of the Catholic Church and found his own Church of England. Hunne was eventually vindicated, and his possessions, including his Bible, were returned to daughter Anne Hunne, who married the great-grandfather of Massachusetts Bay Colony founder John Winthrope.

The Hunne Bible, however, didn’t cross the Atlantic until the 1800s, by which time Hunne’s ownership of the book had been forgotten. After passing through the hands of Mary Baker Eddy and Boston University, among other owners, Biondi bought the Bible for the Heritage Bookshop in Southern California, immediately resel-ling it to a Los Angeles area collector. Eventually, it was put on the open market with a pricetag of $1.5 million.

That’s when leading Reformation scholar William Cooper of Oxford saw Internet information about the Bible’s availability to buyers. Cooper called Biondi to inform him that he had rediscovered Hunne’s onetime ownership of the bound manuscript, thanks to his reading of medieval court documents relating to Hunne’s lawsuits. The Bible’s price then doubled to $3 million.

Tickets are $15 for general admission, with discounts for seniors, students and large groups. They must be bought in advance and for scheduled times.

Call the center at 615-904-2787 for reservations. For more information, visit deadseaexhibit.com.

For more information on the Center for the Arts’ Bible origins exhibition visit deadseaexhibit.com and boroshows.com.